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Do Newspapers Matter?

Yes. But don’t take my word for it. Instead, check out this new working paper by Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, both at Princeton.

The authors present a case study of the consequences of closing a newspaper — in this situation, The Cincinnati Post, which published its last edition on Dec. 31, 2007. They argue that the closing of The Post — which left the Cincinnati Enquirer as the area’s only daily — has led to lower voter turnout, fewer candidates running for municipal office in the suburbs most reliant on The Post, and greater re-election chances for incumbents.

The study looked at only the Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati, since the Ohio suburbs had not had regular municipal elections since The Post closed. Reading through newspaper archives, the authors noted which Kentucky suburbs had received the most coverage from The Post as opposed to The Enquirer. They then compared changes in political outcomes before and after The Post’s closure in suburbs that received relatively more or less coverage from that paper.

As it turned out, those areas in which The Post had dominated coverage had less democratically “vibrant” elections in 2008 (after The Post had closed) than did their Enquirer-dominated counterparts.

Mr. Schulhofer-Wohl, an economics and public affairs professor, and Mr. Garrido, who appears to be an undergraduate (according to Princeton’s Web site), call their work “statistically imprecise.” Still, they say:

[O]ur findings suggest that even a small newspaper — the Post sold about 27,000 copies daily in 2007, compared with 200,000 for the Enquirer — can make local politics more vibrant. Although competing publications or other media such as TV, radio and blogs may take up some slack when a newspaper closes, none of these appears so far to have fully filled the Post’s role in municipal politics in northern Kentucky.

Here is a question: Before the current slump were newspapers actually losing money or were the just failing to make the high rates of return that investors had become used to?

I am thinking that this would make a big difference in the policy we might adopt toward newspapers. Say we were losing papers during the boom because other industries – “investment banking” a.k.a. debt mining – brought in higher returns than publishing the news. Then we might want to keep them around through the slump because we would expect that the alternate investments in the recovering economy would not be as profitable as investment banking etc.

This is an interesting study. I think there is some more statistically sophisticated economics literate on this topic but I like the natural experiments approach that this project takes to the topic.

Their estimates are only imprecise insofar as they rely on the assumptions of any difference-in-differences model. It attests to their skill that they realize and acknowledge this potential limitation of their approach (many social science scientists would not).

The results are believable because, as the other comments here note, newspapers are particularly valuable for local politics. Certainly television, radio, and internet may contain some local content, the local content provided by these media outlets pales in comparison to that provided by local newspapers.

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